Kahlil Gibran's aphorisms, stories, and poetry on a theme remain
among some of those best known to Western readers. His views,
however, extend beyond the most-quoted "greeting card" sayings to
a wide realm of human emotions and relationships--passion,
desire, idealized love, justice, friendship, and the challenges
of dealing with strangers, neighbors, and enemies. This little
book captures love and life in all of their complexities and... more...

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of hermeneutics is one of the most
important modern theories of interpretation and understanding,
and at its heart is the experience of reading literature. In this
clear and comprehensive guide to Gadamer’s thought, Karl Simms:
presents an overview of Gadamer’s life and works, outlining
his importance to hermeneutic theory and its place in literary
studies
explains and puts into context his key... more...

Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant
interpretations. Angelic to some, he is demonic to others. To
recall Lacan’s career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is
over, is to remember an intellectual and literary adventure that
occupies a founding place in our modernity. Lacan went against the
current of many of the hopes aroused by 1968, but embraced their
paradoxes, and his language games and wordplay resonate today as... more...

The figure of the monster in medieval culture functions as a
vehicle for a range of intellectual and spiritual inquiries, from
questions of language and representation to issues of moral,
theological, and cultural value. Monstrosity is bound up with
questions of body image and deformity, nature and knowledge,
hybridity and horror. To explore a culture's attitudes to the
monstrous is to comprehend one of its most important symbolic... more...

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in
English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man
himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a
misogynist and a narcissist. Now Larkin scholar James Booth, for
seventeen years a colleague of the poet’s at the University of
Hull, offers a very different portrait. Drawn from years of
research and a wide variety of Larkin’s friends and... more...

This engaging introduction outlines the cultural and political
contexts in which the avant-gardes operated, taking readers on a
journey throughout the whole of Europe. It discusses the most
salient features of the avant-gardes' work in all the arts,
succinctly surveys the major avant-garde movements (cubism,
futurism, expressionism, Dadaism, constructivism and many other
-isms) and demonstrates the ways in which they transformed the face
of all modern... more...

The Terminator film series is
an unlikely site of queer affiliation. The entire premise revolves
around both heterosexual intercourse and the woman's pregnancy and
giving birth. It is precisely the Terminator's indifference to both
that signifies it as an unimaginably inhuman monstrosity. Indeed,
the films' overarching contention that humanity must be saved,
rooted as it is in a particular story about pregnancy and birth
that exclusively... more...

This book is the first full-length study to focus on the various
film adaptations of Patricia Highsmith’s novels, which have been
a popular source for adaptation since Alfred Hitchcock’s
Strangers on a Train (1952). The collection of essays
examines films such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Two
Faces of January, and Carol, includes interviews with
Highsmith adaptors and provides a comprehensive filmography of
all existing... more...

“Marx did not reject the idea of a human nature. He was right not
to do so.”
That is the conclusion of this passionate and polemical new work by
Norman Geras. In it, he places the sixth of Marx’s Theses on
Feuerbach under rigorous scrutiny. He argues that this
ambiguous statement—widely cited as evidence that Marx broke with
all conceptions of human nature in 1845—must be read in the context
of Marx’s work as a whole. His later writings... more...